In the wake of the devastating globalisms of the neoliberals, a focus on the rise of illiberal states perpetrating egregious violence as the expressive instruments of the far Right threatens to hide longer arcs of political violence and state terror. How are we to reckon with these long arcs, traceable by the repercussions and afterlives of Western European and Anglo-US colonialism and slavery, known and felt in the spectacular and quotidian forms of violence that saturate life now as much as, if not more than, they did in the past?